Cloud Musings

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The ongoing digital transformation continues to
generate a steady demand for workers with increasingly sophisticated digital
skills. This process is multi-dimensional and workers with these highly
specialized skills are very much sought after. The European Union Commission
estimates that there could be a shortage of around 800,000 information and
communications technology (ICT) specialists in the EU by 2020. A third
dimension is the fact that there is a growing need to reskill the existing
workforce, especially in light of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the
incorporation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems into
the industrial production process. The “smart factory” also opens up new
possibilities of individualized and efficient customer care and smoother
communication with suppliers in the supply chain logistics. This is based on
cloud-based platforms and artificial intelligence.

According to the Jacques
Delors Institue in Berlin, digital skills in general are now needed in
almost all types of work. In this recent contribution to the debate on the
European Union the Institute has targeted the societal changes being driven
these broad changes. To address the European continent-wide impact of digital
transformation, this think thank is proposing a Europe-wide strategy to reskill
workers for the requirements of connected production.

The core mission of the Jacques Delors Institute is to
produce analyses and policy proposals targeting European decision-makers and
the wider public. The work of the Jacques Delors Institute is inspired by the action
and ideas of Jacques Delors, and organized around three axes:

"European Union and citizens", which
covers questions of policy, institutions and civil society, focusing in
particular on the themes of participatory democracy, European institutions, European
political parties and European identity.

"European external action", bringing
together work with an international dimension, including EU-US relations, EU
relations with neighbors, and extra-EU regional integration.

These changes are, in essence, combining platform-based
communication with cloud computing, improved sensor technology and the
application of sophisticated algorithms to large and unstructured pools of data
generated by these sensors. This combination makes it possible to link up an
almost infinite number of interconnected physical objects. One of the main
economic impacts of this is seen in the industrial production process and the
emergence of the “smart factory” which enable companies to manufacture
individualized products to marketplace demand in real time.

In response to the need to reskill European workers for the
requirements of connected production, opportunities to get NCTA CloudMASTER®
training and certifications in Europe are expanding rapidly. As a point of
fact, training programs for this cloud computing certification have been
recently announced by:

CloudMASTER® training and certification is comprised
of three courses with exams:

NCTA Cloud Technologies that provide an overview
of cloud computing that will help you develop a deep understanding of the
models and understand the landscape of technologies used in the cloud and those
employed by users of cloud services;

NCTA Cloud Operations that helps you study the
management of cloud operations and addresses the application need for compute
power, managing CPU scaling, and meeting both structured and unstructured
storage requirements; and

NCTA Cloud Architecture that includes hands-on
experience with OpenShift, OpenStack, VMware, Amazon Web Services, Azure and
Rackspace, and provides a framework to assess application performance needs
while addressing business requirements of Return on Investment (ROI), Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The list of training sites is growing fast so if your
country isn’t listed you probably won’t have long to wait. Visit the NCTA
CloudMASTER® registration site for more information.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Sunday, November 27, 2016

As cloud computing simultaneously transforms
multiple industries many have wondered about how this trend will affect
manufacturing. Often characterized as “staid”, this vertical is not often cited
when leading edge technological change is the topic. This view, however, fails
to address the revolutionary nexus of cloud
computing and the manufacturing industry. Referred to
as Digital Thread and Digital Twin; these cloud driven concepts are now driving
this vertical’s future.

Digital
Thread is a communication framework that connects traditionally siloed
elements in manufacturing processes in order to provide an integrated view of
an asset throughout the manufacturing lifecycle. Digital thread implementation
also requires business processes that help weave data-driven decision
management into the manufacturing culture.

A Digital
Twin is a virtual representation of a manufacturer’s product used in
product design, simulation, monitoring, optimization and servicing. They are created
in the same computer-aided design (CAD) and modeling software that designers
and engineers use in the early stages of product development. A digital twin is,
however, retained for later stages of the product's lifecycle, such as
inspection and maintenance.

When successfully combined these processes can
deliver on the promise of Smart
Manufacturing, which include:

·Ability to receive published data from equipment
using secure open standards, analyze and aggregate the data, and trigger
process controls back to equipment, systems of record and process workflows
across the enterprise and value chain connected via A2A and B2B open standards.

·Autonomous and distributed decision support at
the device, machine and factory level.

·Ubiquitous use of mined information throughout
the product value chain including end-to-end value chain visibility for each
product line connecting manufacturer to customers and supplier network.

·Enhanced information- and analytics-based
decision making on large amounts of raw data gathered from the smart
manufacturing equipment and processes.

·New levels of efficiency to support new services
and business models including mass customization (highly configured products)
and product-as-a-service.; and

·Provide a broad portfolio of these advanced
capabilities to manufacturers of all sizes and in all industry sectors, at
acceptable levels of cost and implementation complexity.

Although at first glance these goals seem overly
ambitious, they are being realized today because technologies and integration
standards have come together to fuel this revolution. Required building
blocks include:

·Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – Devices
with network and internet connectivity that are active participants in
event-driven, self-healing manufacturing processes integrated with open
standards that support connectivity.

·Cloud services – On-demand information
technology services that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction.

·Enterprise integration platforms - Platforms
that have the ability to receive data broadcast from equipment via secure open
standards. These applications analyze and aggregate the data, and trigger
process controls, history recording, and work flows that enable business
processes across value chain systems that can then be integrated via application-to-application
(A2A) and business-to-business (B2B) open standards.

Digital Thread and Digital Twin also enable the evolution
in the manufacturing field often referred to as Industry 4.0. This next phase increases
manufacturing efficiencies while reducing both cost and time of delivery. It
brings together data, cloud computing, and cyberphysical systems in order to
deliver:

·Industrialization where machines supported human
work;

·Optimization where assembly lines increased
productivity;

·Automation, where machines largely replaced
humans; and

·Digitalization, where information technology
with its broad portfolio becomes an integral part of manufacturing.

Cloud computing has extended many benefits to manufacturing
because those businesses can now:

·Rely more on standard cloud services allowing
them to focus on business-critical functions.

·Reduce capital expenditures significantly

·Relieves manufacturer of the burden to license,
deploy, and maintain baseline IT services like email, collaboration, unified
communication, and human
relation management

·Enhance operational flexibility through the use
of rapid IT scalability

In summary, the combination of digital thread,
digital twin and cloud computing enables both smart manufacturing and Industry
4.0. If you’re company isn’t deeply leveraging all of these concepts today, you
don’t know anything about manufacturing.

This post was brought
to you byIBM
Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visitPoint B and Beyond.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

So how could a NCTA Certified CloudMASTER accelerate his career in the fashion industry?

To answer that question, you would need to catch up with George Youmans, Jr. He has been with fashion giant Ralph Lauren since October 2012. That was around the time he decided to complete the NCTA CloudMASTER curriculum. After graduation George was first promoted to Senior IT Technician and then to Senior Technologist.

So why would a company like Ralph Lauren even need a cloud computing specialist?

Ralph Lauren installed interactive window displays at London’s most up-market department store, Harrods. Shoppers can use their smartphone to activate an interactive map which led them directly to the Fashion Lab where they could buy all of the items they saw on display. If the store was closed then users could still access information about the Ralph Lauren collection from the Harrods website.

Ralph Lauren conducted a technology trial where they embedded RFID tags in clothing that can be detected by the dressing-room mirror. Details about clothing items are displayed on the mirror (several languages are supported), and the system also synchronizes with inventory and point-of-sale systems. The mirror can also mimic the lighting of various environments. Some of its lighting options are white, dusk, club and aquarium. Other lighting options are tailored to the Ralph Lauren brand like "Fifth Avenue Daylight," "East Hampton Sunset" and "Evening at the Polo Bar".

The luxury fashion brand has also joined the race to produce fashionable products for the wearable-technology market. Its men only PoloTech Shirt was designed to read vital signs like heart rate and variability, breathing depth and recovery, intensity of movement, energy output and stress levels, steps taken and calories burned. Conductive threads are woven into the compression top and a lightweight module snaps around the left rib cage to relay information via Bluetooth. The smartphone app offers live fitness monitoring and offers workouts tailor-made to how your body is reacting. The shirts itself is 70% cotton, 21% nylon and for elasticity 9% spandex.

PoloTech Shirt

Sounds like a great place to accelerate a technology career doesn’t it!

IT staff of the future need the skills of a businessperson to stay current, as their company's software requirements and the options for satisfying them will be deep, varied, and changing quickly. The IT department five years from now will also need to keep pace with nearly constant change. The more complex and interconnected technology environments become, the more a general understanding and knowledge of how it all works together will be valued.

This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

As the industry matures, cloud computing will
increasingly rely on interoperability in order to grow and deliver more value
to industry. Assuming this is a fact, what does it mean when eighteen major
OpenStack vendors come together to work through the challenges involved with
achieving enterprise interoperability? Events at the OpenStack Summit in
Barcelonahelped provide a window into the promise of tomorrow's
interoperable environment.

In cloud computing, interoperability generally refers to the ability of
service models from different cloud service providers to work together.
Specifically:

·Infrastructure-as-a-service

oAccess Mechanism - defines how a service
in cloud may be accessed by users and/or software developers,

oVirtual Resources - service delivery
as a complete software stack of installing a virtual machine,

·Technical
interoperability - development of standards of communication, transport and
representation;

·Semantic
interoperability - the use of various different terms to describe similar
concepts may cause problems in communication, execution of programs and data transfers;

·Political/Human
interoperability - the decision to make resources widely available has
implications for organizations, their employees and end-users;

·Interoperability
of communities or societies - there is an increasing need to require access to
information from a wide range of sources and communities; and

·International
interoperability - in international matters, there are variations in standard,
communication problems, language barriers, differences in communication styles,
and a lack of common basis.

As
one may imagine, the rapid growth of cloud computing and the global
proliferation of service providers has created an intractable many-to-many
interoperability quagmire that can never be tamed. Knowing this, theOpenstack Interop Challengelooks
toward cultivating success by leveraging the open source cloud technologyas
a common integration layer. Participants
include AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, DreamHost, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, HPE,
Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OSIC, OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and
VMware. The goal was to publicly demonstrate how OpenStack delivers on the
promise of interoperability across on-premises, public and hybrid cloud
deployments.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, argues that

interoperability doesn't start at the infrastructure layer.

Although you would expect this strategy would greatly simplify
the integration challenge, contrarian views are out there.
One of the most vocal is Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis and
member of the OpenStack board of directors. He believes interoperability does
not necessarily start at the IaaS layer. He believes that applications can be
built to be interoperable across different infrastructure platform. Quoting hisOpenStack Summit keynote:

"Even across Mirantis-powered OpenStack clouds like
AT&T and the Volkswagen cloud, they are both based on the same
distribution, but the underlying reference architectures are dramatically
different…Volkswagen can't throw something at AT&T and it will just
work."

In this post I’m happy to report though that the participating
OpenStack cloud vendors were able to announce a successful completion of the
interoperability challenge. While this success is clearly a baby step on
the long and treacherous road to cloud interoperability, it is worth noting
because this modest achievement also led to the creation of automated tools for
the deployment of applications across a variety of OpenStack environments.The effort also generated significant collateral
on cloud computing interoperability best practices and is expected to drive
even further interoperability collaboration across the Openstack community.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

As cloud computing becomes the information technology mainstream,
data center technology is accelerating at a breakneck speed. Concepts like
software define infrastructure, data center analytics and Nonvolatile Memory
Express (NVMe) over Fabrics are changing the very nature of data center
management. According to industry
research firm IDC, organizations will spend an additional $142.8 billion oninfrastructure for both public and private cloud environments in the next three
years (2016-2018) to boost efficiency and business agility.

To support this rapid evolving space, Intel announced a “Cloud for All” initiative last year in order to help businesses get the most out of
their cloud infrastructure. Specific goals for this initiative include:

Optimizing
SDI solutions to deliver highly efficient clouds across a range of workloads by
taking full advantage of Intel platform capabilities; and

Aligning
the industry and engaging the community through open industry standards,
solutions and routes to market to accelerate cloud deployment.

As cloud infrastructure management is moving towards these new
management paradigms, those at the leading edge are exploring how to make data
center’s think for themselves. Industry leaders like Dr. Brian Womack, Director of Distributed Analytics Solutions in Intel’s Data Center Solutions Group, and
Das Kamhout, Senior Principal Engineer at Intel are learning how to use data,
artificial intelligence frameworks and machine learning to create data centers
that think for themselves. Two key components of their vision are SNAP and TAP.

SNAP is a powerful open data center telemetry framework. It
can be used to easily collect, process, and publish telemetry data at scale. It
enables better data center scheduling and workload management through access to
underlying telemetry data and platform metrics. The framework greatly improves
system administrator control of the intelligent use of data center infrastructure
in cloud environments by:

Empowering systems to expose a consistent set of
telemetry data;

Simplifying telemetry ingestion across
ubiquitous storage system;

Improving the deployment model, packaging and
flexibility for collecting telemetry;

Providing powerful clustered control of
telemetry workflows across small or large clusters.

Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) makes the SNAP telemetry usable
by providing the tools, components and services necessary in the creation of
advanced analytics and machine learning solutions. TAP makes these resources
accessible in one place for data scientists, application developers and system
operators. An open-source software platform optimized for performance and
security, TAP simplifies solution development through the delivery of a collaborative
and flexible integrated environment.

With TAP, Interactive analysis, modeling and algorithmic
process flows on any type of raw data, streaming in real-time or batch data, is
possible using either a GUI or a text-based shell. These models and flows can
be used for batch processing or be integrated into applications. TAP includes
REST APIs usable by any web-capable language (e.g., Python, Java, PHP, Ruby,
Javascript) over HTTP, as well as a Python API, for server-local access. It
operates on most data stores and file systems, including cluster federations
that can enable data sharing (with security). The integrated operations
management tools in TAP allow monitoring and control from top to bottom. In
support of trust, TAP Security follows layered security and deep defense
principles to provide transparent encryption and decryption, as well as
fine-grained access authorization, based on a variety of authentication
mechanisms and assurance levels.

Used in combination, SNAP and TAP could be used to make
sentient data centers a reality.

This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.

Monday, October 31, 2016

A recent report by Praetorian,
a cybersecurity company headquartered in Austin, TX, focused on threats that
resulted in data compromise or access to sensitive information. Based on a
review of 100 separate internal penetration test engagements the study
identified the five most prevalent threats to corporate data. The amazing thing about these weaknesses
is that the top four are all based on utilizing stolen credentials and the last
one helps an attacker be more effective in using those stolen credentials. In other words, the enemy is right there in
the mirror! The study spanned 75 unique
organizations and only focused on security weaknesses that were used to obtain
a full network compromise.

The most prevalent threat is something we’ve all heard of
before – Weak Domain User Passwords. Since most corporate environments use
Microsoft’s Active Directory to manage employee accounts and access, it needs
some improvements in order to fully address complex passwords. Since Active
Directory only requires passwords to be a specific length and contain specific
character sets so addressing this weakness will require the use of third-party
software.

The next most common corporate threat is Broadcast Name Resolution Poisoning. Using this vector, an attacker responds to
broadcast requests (i.e. LLMNR, NetBIOS, MDNS, etc) by providing its own IP. When this is done, the credentials of a user
accessing network resources can be instead transmitted to the attacker’s
system.

The next big no-no is when system administrators all use the
same Local Admin password. If an
attacker is able to compromise the LM/NT hash representation of the password,
then the attacker can use the hash to authenticate and execute commands on
other systems that have the same password.
Using the hash, an attacker doesn’t need the actual password at all!

Microsoft Windows operating systems have another embedded password
weakness. Believe it or not, the
operating system stores domain
credentials in cleartext within memory of the Local Security Authority
Subsystem Service (LSASS) process.
Although this weakness requires an attacker to have Local Admin or
SYSTEM-level access, it ranks high on the threat list.

This last threat enhances all of the other - Insufficient Network Access Controls.
Many organizations don’t restrict network access based on business
requirements. This will enable
unfettered attacker mobility after only a single system on the internal network
has been compromised.

These threat vectors, last updated by Praetorian in June 2016, were evaluated
as part of a complete corporate network compromise kill chain. They also highlight the importance of understanding
the cybersecurity threat. Although the
mirror is a good place to start improving on network security, you must also
work to identify all your organization’s security pain points.
With that knowledge you can more effectively enhance your team’s
defenses and eventually evolve towards a better understanding of your security
threat environment.

If you are serious about protecting your data, download
the full report and read about the effective strategies your company can
use to protect itself. If you are a CISO
or corporate executives, IBM also provides some excellent information on how to
secure the C-suite. They also provide an
interactive tool
that can help better analyze your threats, protect your users and save your
data from these and many other security challenges.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.

Digital transformation is the profound and accelerating
transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to
fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their
impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way. Executives in all
industries are using digital advances such as analytics, mobility, social media
and smart embedded devices as well as improving their use of traditional
technologies such as ERP to change customer relationships, internal processes and
value propositions.

This means that if you want to have an IT
career in five years, you must strive to be a Digital Transformer, not just
a cloud technician. Our society is experiencing
a fundamental shift in information technology’s overarching mission, with the
support-and-maintain mind-set giving way to a more strategic, software-centric
vision for IT. IT staff of the future
need the skills of a businessperson to stay current, as their company's
software requirements and the options for satisfying them will be deep, varied,
and changing quickly. The IT department
five years from now will also need to keep pace with nearly constant change. CloudMASTER®
training and certification is comprised of three courses with exams:

NCTA Cloud Technologies that provide an overview
of cloud computing that will help you develop a deep understanding of the
models and understand the landscape of technologies used in the cloud and those
employed by users of cloud services. You will receive multiple points of view, firsthand
experience and a foundation in managing industry leading cloud services like
Amazon Web Services, Drupal, Wordpress, Google Docs and Digital Ocean.

NCTA Cloud Operations that helps you study the
management of cloud operations and addresses the application need for compute
power, managing CPU scaling, and meeting both structured and unstructured
storage requirements. You will learn how to painlessly deploy fairly complex
applications that scale across multiple instances in cloud technologies including
Windows Azure Chef, Chef Solo, Linux and Windows Tools.

NCTA Cloud Architecture that includes hands-on
experience with OpenShift, OpenStack, VMware, Amazon Web Services, Azure and
Rackspace, and provides a framework to assess application performance needs
while addressing business requirements of Return on Investment (ROI), Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Groups will
complete a cloud assessment of Fortune 100 firms using public information and
make presentations to the client.

The more complex and interconnected cloud environments become,
the more a general understanding and knowledge of how it all works together
will be valued. IT staff will no longer
be the ones responsible for “managing the plumbing”, they'll be the people who
are thinking of new ways to monetize, share, and use corporate data for
organizational success.

So which future do
you want for you and your family?

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Recently I've been doing
quite a bit of analysis work using the IBM Watson cognitive business platform. The really exciting thing about this
opportunity is the way data can seem to have a conversation with you.
This got me wondering if social media data could carry on a conversation
as well. Given my almost unhealthy interest in cloud computing, we ran a
one week experiment to "crowdsource the internet" in order to see if it
held any interesting cloud computing insights. To narrow the volume of documents down to a
reasonable number, I limited providers to those on the most recent Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant:

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Google

VMware

IBM

Rackspace

Verizon

CSC

Interoute

CenturyLink

Dimension Data

Fujitsu

Joyent

NTT Communications

Virtustream

Leveraging Watson, I gathered cloud computing related social
media documents. According to Watson, in
one 24-hr period, there were 46,869 documents that mentioned these Cloud
Service Providers (CSP) a total of 57,997 times. Google was totally dominating
the online conversation with 73% of all mentions. Microsoft was a poor second
at 17%.

Figure 1-
Social media cloud computing "Share of Voice"

At this this point I
took a look at overall industry sentiment. From this vantage point, Interoute
outshines all rivals for positive sentiment.
Of particular note, however, was that Dimension Data simultaneously held
the crown for largest percentage of negative and lowest percentage of positive
sentiment (which seems to be centered mostly around the dropout of a rider from its Tour de France team and a recent internal restructuring). The Dell/EMC cloud provider Virtustream doesn’t even seem to be
present in social media conversations.

Figure 2- Customer Sentiment Regarding Cloud Service
Providers

Figure
3 - Cloud Service Model "Share of Voice"

Microsoft dominated that segment of the conversation that specifically
addressed the three standard cloud computing service models
(Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS], Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS],
Software-as-a-Service [SaaS]). Over 53% of the working set referenced Microsoft
with second place AWS coming in at 13.5%. Software-as-a-service is the
unsurprising overall service model leader but Microsoft seems to be edging out
AWS for Infrastructure-as-a-Service mentions.
Platform-as-a-Service is a distant laggard with only three providers
(Microsoft, AWS and VMware) represented in social media exchanges.

Figure 4- Industry Vertical Cloud Computing "Share
of Voice

In order to glean some
business value, the documents were binned across thirteen industry verticals
and analyzed for share of voice and author sentiment. The initial industry bins
were:

Construction

Manufacturing

Wholesale trade

Information technology

Retail trade

Utilities

Financial services

Educational services

Transportation and warehousing

Entertainment, accommodation, and food services

Healthcare and social services

Public administration

Across this set, entertainment,
government, education and healthcare industries seem to be most interested in
the cloud. Surprising to me is that the construction industry interest
surpasses that of financial services. Google seems to be driving industry
related social media conversations with Microsoft and IBM rounding out the top
three.

Although I wouldn’t use this non-scientific experiment to make any big
bets, it does demonstrate how actionable data can be gleaned from the social
media stream. It may also shed a little
light on the power of cognitive computing in the business world.

One especially intriguing capability that I didn’t use in this
experiment is the use of Watson
Explorer technologies with Semantic Analytics. This solution is currently being used by IBM
GTS to deliver “built to purpose” cognitive systems for the information
technology industry vertical.

Figure 5- Cloud Service Provider Industry "Share of
Voice

A key differentiator of
this approach is its ability to extract meaning from the fragmented sentences normally
found in unstructured IT service ticket description fields. Due to the global
nature of GTS Services, this unstructured text is typically in multiple
languages. Additionally, due to the different language skill levels of the
globally sourced pool of agents, the grammar quality varies. This solution is
used by GTS to uncover patterns and trends in the identification of
contributing incident causes in order to prescribe appropriate preventative
actions.

The digital transformation couple with cognitive computing is
accelerating almost every industry. In the IT world, at least, cognitive
computing promises to deliver the ability to bridge the gap between
unstructured language data and effective maintenance action by correlating
social media chatter and customer sentiments with the root causes of
operational IT issues.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.